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Participation vs. OBSERVATION...

"This universe of ours, what is it really? Here we are, centres of consciousness, surrounded by a buzzing confusion which we must try to understand. But we are of the selfsame stuff of the universe -- perhaps ultimately a cloud of energy interacting with other clouds of energy -- and on that account we are in the role more of participants than observers. We cannot distance ourselves from our ambient, hold it at arm's length for impartial scrutiny. This fact has been heavily underlined by modern physics since it sets limits to our knowledge. What we experience is not external reality per se but our interaction with it, so that in a very real sense we are constructing our universe from ourselves."

"The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, and "consciousness" cannot evolve unconsciously. The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and "will" cannot evolve involuntarily. The evolution of man is the evolution of his power of doing, and "doing" cannot be the result of things which "happen."

-- G. I. Gurdjieff

A Bit of a Bio:

Frederick Woodruff

Astro Inquiry is published in Washington State -- beaming out from Vashon Island. When I was 14 years-old, I made the dogged effort to write to as many astrologers in California as I could, seeing which, if any would take me on as a student. I lucked out with my teachers Ivy Goldstein Jacobson and Margaret Latvala, and studied with them through my high school years. A year later I became a member of Llewellyn George’s Educational Astrology organization in Los Angeles. I helped write, edit and publish the group’s quarterly newsletters... continues

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“A neurotic human being is a childish human being. A psychotic human being is an infantile human being. A healthy human being is an adult.” — A.H. Almaas.

Yesterday’s new moon occurred in the eighth degree of Virgo. One of the zodiacal degrees associated with the student teacher relationship. So that’s what I’ll be writing about today. The symbol’s specific image is: “A five-year-old takes a first dancing lesson.”

In his book on the Sabian Symbols, Dane Rudhyar writes the following: “The individual can express his own individual character only according to traditional modes. He is still entirely responsible to his teacher… Yet new perspectives are now open to him.” Rudhyar also notes that this degree is associated with “the potentiality of initiation.” The number five, taken from the child’s age, represents a movement towards “conscious manhood.”

When I turned 32 I had the good fortune of finding my spiritual teachers. Actually my spiritual teachers found me, but I’ll say more about that seeming mystery as I go.

Events in my life, around the time of meeting my teachers, were difficult, both externally and psychologically. And I had exhausted whatever quantity of fuel my personality was burning to maneuver, manage and ‘design’ my life. I was literally running on empty; my mantra being a line I’d read in one of Maurice Nicoll‘s Commentaries. Quoting Ouspensky: “It’s only when you realize that life is taking you nowhere that it begins to have meaning.”

Depression was a constant. This despite the fact that I had a ‘fulfilling’ career as an artist. A parade of boyfriends. And lived in a beautiful tropical valley, recessed in the hills of Honolulu. Better yet, I was tucked away on an island, 3,000 miles away from my mother and father. Surely I was an autonomous adult, finally free from my family matrix; a condition that I’d drawn a dark curtain across after graduating high school and moving to Los Angeles in my late teens.

But then a family death opened a trapdoor and I tumbled down the rabbit hole. A hole created by what I call the “blow back” of death — a kind of astral opening where the shock of death exposes the various blinders and “buffers,” as Gurdjieff called them, that keep the deluded sense of immortality humming within oneself. Three months later I met my teachers and joined a Work school. Read more

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